Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson
And, how did the little boy who had ridden a plastic tricycle end up being killed on the other side of the world?
‘What was he doing in Afghanistan?’ I said. ‘Why there?’
Ben told me we were at war. A war against terror, he said, though I don’t know what that means. He said there was an attack, an awful attack, in America. Thousands were killed.
‘And now my boy ends up dead in Afghanistan?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand …’
‘It’s complicated,’ he said. ‘He always wanted to join the army. He thought he was doing his duty.’
‘His duty? Did you think that was what he was doing? His duty? Did I? Why didn’t you persuade him to do something else? Anything?’
‘Christine, it was what he wanted.’
For an awful moment I almost laughed. ‘To get himself killed? Is that what he wanted? Why? I never even knew him.’
Ben was silent. He squeezed my hand, and a single tear rolled down my face, hot as acid, and then another, and then more. I wiped them away, frightened that to start to cry would be never to stop.
I felt my mind begin to close down, to empty itself, to retreat into nothingness. ‘I never even knew him,’ I said.
Later, Ben brought down a box and put it on the coffee table in front of us.
‘I keep these upstairs,’ he said. ‘For safety.’
From what? I thought. The box was grey, made of metal. The kind of box in which one might keep money, or important documents.
Whatever it contains must be dangerous. I imagined wild animals, scorpions and snakes, hungry rats, venomous toads. Or an invisible virus, something radioactive.
‘For safety?’ I said.
He sighed. ‘There are some things it wouldn’t be good for you to stumble on when you’re by yourself, some things that it’s better if I explain to you.’
He sat next to me and opened the box. I could see nothing inside but paper.
‘This is Adam as a baby,’ he said, taking out a handful of photographs and handing one to me.
It was a picture of me, on a street. I am walking towards the camera, with a baby – Adam – strapped to my chest in a pouch. His body is facing mine, but he is looking over his shoulder at whoever is taking the picture, the smile on his face a toothless approximation of my own.
‘You took this?’
Ben nodded. I looked at it again. It was torn, its edges stained, the colours fading as if it were slowly bleaching to white.
Me. A baby. It did not seem real. I tried to tell myself I was a mother.
‘When?’ I said.
Ben looked over my shoulder. ‘He would have been about six months old then,’ he said. ‘So, let’s see. That must be about nineteen eighty-seven.’
I would have been twenty-seven. A lifetime ago.
My son’s lifetime.
‘When was he born?’
He dug his hand into the box again, passed me a slip of paper. ‘January,’ he said. It was yellow, brittle. A birth certificate. I read it in silence. His name was there. Adam.
‘Adam Wheeler,’ I said, out loud. To myself as much as to Ben.
‘Wheeler is my last name,’ he said. ‘We decided he should have my name.’
‘Of course,’ I said. I brought the paper up to my face. It felt too light to be a vessel for so much meaning. I wanted to breathe it in, for it to become part of me.
‘Here,’ said Ben. He took the paper from me and folded it. ‘There are more pictures,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see them?’
He handed me a few more photographs.
‘We don’t have that many,’ he said as I looked at them. ‘A lot were lost.’
He made it sound as if they had been left on trains or given to strangers for safekeeping.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I remember. We had a fire.’ I said it without thinking.
He looked at me oddly, his eyes narrowed, pinched tight.
‘You remember?’ he said.
Suddenly I wasn’t sure. Had he told me about the fire this morning or was I remembering him telling me the other day? Or was it just that I had read it in my journal after breakfast?
‘Well, you told me about it.’
‘I did?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
When was it? Had it been that morning, or days ago? I thought of my journal, remembered reading it after he’d gone to work. He’d told me about the fire as we sat on Parliament Hill.
I could have told him about my journal then, but something held me back. He seemed less than happy that I had remembered something. ‘Before you left for work,’ I said. ‘When we looked through the scrapbook. You must have, I suppose.’
He frowned. It felt terrible to be lying to him, but I didn’t feel able to cope with more revelations. ‘How would I know otherwise?’
He looked directly at me. ‘I suppose so.’
I paused for a moment, looking at the handful of photographs in my hand. They were pitifully few, and I could see that the box didn’t contain many more. Were they really all I would ever have to describe my son’s life?
‘How did the fire start?’ I said.
The clock on the mantelpiece chimed. ‘It was years ago. In our old house. The one we lived in before we came here.’ I wondered if he meant the one I’d been to. ‘We lost a lot of things. Books, papers. That kind of stuff.’
‘But how did it start?’ I said.
For a moment he said nothing. His mouth began to open and close, and then he said, ‘It was an accident. Just an accident.’
I wondered what he was not telling me. Had I left a cigarette burning, or the iron plugged in, or a pot to boil dry? I imagined myself in the kitchen I had stood in the day before yesterday, with its concrete worktop and white units, but years ago. I saw myself standing over a sizzling fryer, shaking the wire basket that contained the sliced potatoes that I was cooking, watching as they floated to the surface before rolling and sinking back under the oil. I saw myself hear the phone ring, wipe my hands on the apron I had tied around my waist, go into the hall.
What then? Had the oil burst into flames as I took the call, or had I wandered back into the living room, or up to the bathroom, with no recollection of ever having begun to cook dinner?
I don’t know, can never know. But it was kind of Ben to tell me that it had been an accident. Domesticity has so many dangers for someone without a memory, and another husband might have pointed out my mistakes and deficits, might have been unable to resist taking the moral high ground. I touched his arm, and he smiled.
I thumbed through the handful of photographs. There was one of Adam wearing a plastic cowboy hat and a yellow neckerchief aiming a plastic rifle at the person with the camera, and in another he was a few years older; his face thinner, his hair beginning to darken. He was wearing a shirt buttoned to the neck, and a child’s tie.
‘That was taken at school,’ said Ben. ‘An official portrait.’ He pointed to the photograph and laughed. ‘Look. It’s such a shame. The picture’s ruined!’
The elastic of the tie was visible, not tucked under the collar. I ran my hands over the picture. It wasn’t ruined, I thought. It was perfect.
I tried to remember my son, tried to see myself kneeling in front of him with an elasticated tie, or combing his hair, or wiping dried blood from a grazed knee.
Nothing came. The boy in the photograph shared a fullness of mouth with me, and had eyes that resembled, vaguely, my mother’s, but otherwise he could have been a stranger.
Ben took out another picture and gave it to me. In it Adam was a little older – maybe seven. ‘Do you think he looks like me?’ he said.
He was holding a football, dressed in shorts and a white T-shirt. His hair was short, spiked with sweat. ‘A little,’ I said. ‘Perhaps.’
Ben smiled, and together we carried on looking at the photographs. They were mostly of me and Adam, the occasional one of him alone; Ben must have taken the majority. In a few he was with friend
There was a letter tucked amongst the pictures. It was addressed to Santa Claus and written in blue crayon. The jerky letters danced across the page. He wants a bike, he says, or a puppy, and promises to be good. It is signed, and he has added his age. Four.
I don’t know why, but as I read it my world seemed to collapse. Grief exploded in my chest like a grenade. I had been feeling calm – not happy, not even resigned, but calm – and that serenity vanished, as if vaporized. Beneath it I was raw.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, handing the bundle back to Ben. ‘I can’t. Not now.’
He hugged me. I felt nausea rise in my throat, but swallowed it down. He told me not to worry, told me I would be fine, reminded me that he was here for me, that he always would be. I clung to him, and we sat there, rocking together. I felt numb, totally removed from the room in which we sat. I watched him get me a glass of water, watched as he closed the box of photographs. I was sobbing. I could see that he was upset too, yet already his expression seemed tinged with something else. Resignation, it could have been, or acceptance, but not shock.
With a shudder I realized that he has done all this before. His grief is not new. It has had the time to bed down within him, to become part of his foundations, rather than something that rocks them.
It is only my grief that is fresh, every day.
I made an excuse. I came upstairs, to the bedroom. Back to the wardrobe. I wrote on.
These snatched moments. Kneeling in front of the wardrobe or leaning on the bed. Writing. I am feverish. It floods out of me, almost without thought. Pages and pages. I am here again now, while Ben thinks I am resting. I cannot stop. I want to write down everything.
I wonder if this is what it was like when I wrote my novel, this pouring on to the page. Or had that been slower, more considered? I wish I could remember.
After I went downstairs I made us both a cup of tea. As I stirred in the milk I thought of how many times I must have made meals for Adam, puréeing vegetables, mixing juice. I took the tea back through to Ben. ‘Was I a good mother?’ I said, handing it to him.
‘Christine—’
‘I have to know,’ I said. ‘I mean, how did I cope? With a child? He must have been very little when I—’
‘—had your accident?’ he interrupted. ‘He was two. You were a wonderful mother, though. Until then. Afterwards, well—’
He stopped talking, letting the rest of the sentence disappear, and turned away. I wondered what it was he was leaving unsaid, what he’d thought better of telling me.
I knew enough to fill in some of the blanks. I might not be able to remember that time, but I can imagine it. I can see myself being reminded every day that I was married and a mother, being told that my husband and son were coming to visit me. I can imagine myself greeting them both every day as if I had never seen them before, slightly frostily, perhaps, or simply bewildered. I can see the pain we must have been in. All of us.
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I understand.’
‘You couldn’t look after yourself. You were too ill for me to look after you at home. You couldn’t be left alone, even for a few minutes. You would forget what you were doing. You used to wander off. I was worried you might run yourself a bath and leave the water running, or try and cook yourself some food and forget you’d started it. It was too much for me. So I stayed at home and looked after Adam. My mother helped. But every evening we would come and see you, and—’
I took his hand.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I just find it hard, thinking of that time.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know. How about my mother, though? Did she help? Did she enjoy being a grandmother?’ He nodded, and looked about to speak. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ I said.
He squeezed my hand. ‘She died a few years ago. I’m sorry.’
I had been right. I felt my mind begin to close down, as if it couldn’t process any more grief, any more of this scrambled past, but I knew I would wake up tomorrow and remember none of this.
What could I write in my journal that would get me through tomorrow, the next day, the one after that?
An image floated in front of me. A woman, with red hair. Adam in the army. A name came, unbidden. What will Claire think?
And there it was. The name of my friend. Claire.
‘And Claire?’ I said. ‘My friend Claire. Is she still alive?’
‘Claire?’ said Ben. He looked puzzled for a long moment, and then his face changed. ‘You remember Claire?’
He seemed surprised. I reminded myself that – according to my journal at least – it had been a few days since I had told him I had remembered her at the party on the roof.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We were friends. What happened to her?’
Ben looked at me, sadly, and for a moment I froze. He spoke slowly, but his news was not as bad as I feared. ‘She moved away,’ he said. ‘Years ago. Must be nearly twenty years, I think. Just a few years after we got married, in fact.’
‘Where to?’
‘New Zealand.’
‘Are we in touch?’
‘You were for a while, but no. Not any more.’
It doesn’t seem possible. My best friend, I had written, after remembering her on Parliament Hill, and I had felt the same sensation of closeness when I had thought of her today. Otherwise, why would I care what she thought?
‘We argued?’
He hesitated, and again I sensed a calculation, an adjustment. I realized that of course Ben knows what will upset me. He has had years to learn what I will find acceptable and what is dangerous ground for us to tread. After all, this is not the first time he has had this conversation. He has had the opportunity to practise, to learn how to navigate routes that will not rip through the landscape of my life and send me tumbling somewhere else.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. You didn’t argue. Or not that you ever told me anyway. I think you just drifted apart, and then Claire met someone, and she married him and they moved away.’
An image came then. Claire and I joking that we would never marry. ‘Marriage is for losers!’ she was saying as she raised a bottle of red wine to her lips, and I was agreeing, though at the same time I knew that one day I would be her bridesmaid, and she mine, and we would sit in hotel rooms, dressed in organza, sipping champagne from a flute while someone did our hair.
I felt a sudden flush of love. Though I have barely remembered any of our time, our life, together – and tomorrow even that will have gone – I sensed somehow that we are still connected, that for a while she had meant everything to me.
‘Did we go to the wedding?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he nodded, opening the box on his lap and digging through it. ‘There are a couple of photos here.’
They were wedding pictures, though not formal shots; these were blurred and dark, taken by an amateur. By Ben, I guessed. I approached the first one cautiously.
She was as I had imagined her. Tall, thin. More beautiful, if anything. She was standing on a clifftop, her dress diaphanous, blowing in the breeze, the sun setting over the sea behind her. I put the picture down and looked through the rest. In some she was with her husband – a man I didn’t recognize – and in others I had joined them, dressed in pale-blue silk, looking only slightly less beautiful. It was true; I had been a bridesmaid.
‘Are there any of our wedding?’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘They were in a separate album,’ he said. ‘It was lost.’
Of course. The fire.
I handed the photos back to him. I felt like I was looking at another life, not my own. I desperately wanted to get upstairs, to write about what I had discovered.
‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘I need to rest.’
‘Of course,’ he said. He held out his hand. ‘Here.’ He took the bundle of photographs from me and put them back in the box.
Midnight. I am in bed. Alone. Trying to make sense of all that has happened today. All that I have learned. I don’t know whether I can.
I decided to take a bath before dinner. I locked the bathroom door behind me and looked quickly at the pictures arranged around the mirror, now seeing only what was missing. I turned on the hot tap.
Most days I realize I don’t remember Adam at all, yet today he had come to me after I saw just one picture. Are these photographs selected so they will anchor me in myself without reminding me of what I have lost?
The room began to fill with hot steam. I could hear my husband downstairs. He had turned on the radio and the sound of jazz floated up to me, hazy and indistinct. Beneath it I could hear the rhythmic slice of a knife on a board; he would be chopping carrots, onions, peppers. Making dinner, as if this were a normal day.
For him it is a normal day, I realized. I am filled with grief, but not Ben.
I don’t blame him for not telling me, every day, about Adam, my mother, Claire. In his position I would do the same. These things are painful, and if I can go a whole day without remembering them then I am spared the sorrow and he the pain of causing it. How tempting it must be for him to keep quiet, and how difficult life must be for him, knowing that I carry these jagged shards of memory with me always, everywhere, like tiny bombs, and at any moment one might pierce the surface and force me to go through the pain as if for the first time, taking him with me.
I undressed slowly, folded my clothes, placed them on the chair by the side of the bath. Naked, I stood in front of the mirror and stared at my alien body. I forced myself to look at the wrinkles in my skin, at my sagging breasts. I do not know myself, I thought. I recognize neither my body nor my past.
I stepped closer to the mirror. They were there, across my stomach, on my buttocks and breasts. Thin, silvery streaks, the jagged scars of history. I had not seen them before, because I hadn’t looked for them. I pictured myself charting their growth, willing them to disappear as my body expanded. Now I am glad they are there; a reminder.