Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson
‘OK,’ I said, and now we sat in his car, stationary in stuck traffic. ‘Did I call you yesterday?’ I asked. He said that I had.
‘You read your journal?’
‘Most of it. I skipped bits. It’s already quite long.’
He seemed interested. ‘What sections did you skip?’
I thought for a moment. ‘There are parts that seem familiar to me. I suppose they feel as if they’re just reminding me of things I already know. Already remember …’
‘That’s good.’ He glancied at me. ‘Very good.’
I felt a glow of pleasure. ‘So what did I call about? Yesterday?’
‘You wanted to know if you’d really written a novel,’ he said.
‘And had I? Have I?’
He turned back to me. He was smiling. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, you have.’
The traffic moved again and we pulled away. I felt relief. I knew what I had written was true. I relaxed into the journey.
Dr Paxton was older than I expected. He was wearing a tweed jacket, and white hair sprouted unchecked from his ears and nose. He looked as though he ought to have retired.
‘Welcome to the Vincent Hall Imaging Centre,’ he said once Dr Nash had introduced us, and then, without taking his eyes off mine, he winked and shook my hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added. ‘It’s not as grand as it sounds. Here, come in. Let me show you round.’
We made our way into the building. ‘We’re attached to the hospital and the university here,’ he said as we went through the main entrance. ‘Which can be both a blessing and a curse.’ I didn’t know what he meant and waited for him to elaborate, but he said nothing. I smiled.
‘Really?’ I said. He was trying to help me. I wanted to be polite.
‘Everyone wants us to do everything.’ He laughed. ‘No one wants to pay us for any of it.’
We walked through into a waiting room. It was dotted with empty chairs, copies of the same magazines Ben has left for me at home – Radio Times, Hello!, now joined by Country Life and Marie Claire – and discarded plastic cups. It looked like there had recently been a party that everyone had left in a hurry. Dr Paxton paused at another door. ‘Would you like to see the control room?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Please.’
‘Functional MRI is a fairly new technique,’ he said, once we’d gone through. ‘Have you heard of MRI? Magnetic Resonance Imaging?’
We were standing in a small room, lit only by the ghostly glow from a bank of computer monitors. One wall was taken up by a window, beyond which was another room, dominated by a large cylindrical machine, a bed protruding from it like a tongue. I began to feel afraid. I knew nothing of this machine. Without memory, how could I?
‘No,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘I’m sorry. MRI is a fairly standard procedure. It’s a little like taking an X-ray through the body. Here we’re using some of the same techniques but actually looking at how the brain works. At function.’
Dr Nash spoke then – the first time in a while he had done so – and his voice sounded small, almost timid. I wondered whether he was in awe of Dr Paxton, or was desperate to impress him.
‘If someone has a brain tumour then we need to scan their head to find out where the tumour is, what part of the brain is affected. That’s looking at structure. What functional MRI allows us to see is which part of the brain you use when you do certain tasks. We want to see how your brain processes memory.’
‘Which parts light up, as it were,’ said Paxton. ‘Where the juices are flowing.’
‘That will help?’ I asked.
‘We hope it will help us to identify where the damage is,’ said Dr Nash. ‘What’s gone wrong. What’s not working properly.’
‘And that will help me to get my memory back?’
He paused, and then said, ‘We hope so.’
I took off my wedding ring and my earrings and put them in a plastic tray. ‘You’ll need to leave your bag in here, too,’ said Dr Paxton, and then he asked me if I had anything else pierced. ‘You’d be surprised, my dear,’ he said when I shook my head. ‘Now, she’s a bit of a noisy old beast. You’ll need these.’ He handed me some yellow earplugs. ‘Ready?’
I hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’ Fear was beginning to creep over me. The room seemed to shrink and darken, and through the glass the scanner itself loomed. I had the sense I had seen it before, or one just like it. ‘I’m not sure about this,’ I said.
Dr Nash came over to me then. He placed his hand on my arm.
‘It’s completely painless,’ he said. ‘Just a little noisy.’
‘It’s safe?’
‘Perfectly. I’ll be here, just on this side of the glass. We’ll be able to see you all the way through.’
I must have still looked unsure, because then Dr Paxton added, ‘Don’t worry. You’re in safe hands, my dear. Nothing will go wrong.’ I looked at him, and he smiled and said, ‘You might want to think of your memories as being lost, somewhere in your mind. All we’re doing with this machine is trying to find out where they are.’
It was cold, despite the blanket they had wrapped around me, and dark, except for a red light blinking in the room and a mirror, hung from a frame a couple of inches above my head, angled to reflect the image of a computer screen that sat somewhere else. As well as the earplugs I was wearing a set of headphones through which they said they would talk to me, but for now they were silent. I could hear nothing but a distant hum, the sound of my breathing, hard and heavy, the dull thud of my heartbeat.
In my right hand I clutched a plastic bulb filled with air. ‘Squeeze it, if you need to tell us anything,’ Dr Paxton had said. ‘We won’t be able to hear you if you speak.’ I caressed its rubbery surface and waited. I wanted to close my eyes, but they had told me to keep them open, to look at the screen. Foam wedges kept my head perfectly still; I could not have moved, even if I’d wanted to. The blanket over me, like a shroud.
A moment of stillness, and then a click. So loud that I started, despite the earplugs, and it was followed by another, and a third. A deep noise, from within the machine or my head. I couldn’t tell. A lumbering beast, waking, the moment of silence before the attack. I clutched the rubber bulb, determined that I would not squeeze it, and then a noise, like an alarm or a drill, over and over again, impossibly loud, so loud that the whole of my body shook with each new shock. I closed my eyes.
A voice in my ear. ‘Christine,’ it said. ‘Can you open your eyes, please?’ They could see me then, somehow. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all fine.’
Fine? I thought. What do they know about fine? What do they know about what it’s like to be me, lying here, in a city I don’t remember, with people I’ve never met? I am floating, I thought, completely without anchor, at the mercy of the wind.
A different voice. Dr Nash’s. ‘Can you look at the pictures? Think what they are, say it, but only to yourself. Don’t say anything out loud.’
I opened my eyes. Above me, in the little mirror, were drawings, one after the other, white on black. A man. A ladder. A chair. A hammer. I named each one as it came, and then the screen flashed the words Thank you! Now relax! and I said that to myself, too, to keep myself busy, wondering at the same time how anyone could relax in the belly of a machine like this.
More instructions flashed on the screen. Recall a past event, it said, and then beneath it flashed the words, A party.
I closed my eyes.
I tried to think of the party I had remembered as Ben and I watched the fireworks. I tried to picture myself on the roof next to my friend, to hear the noise of the party beneath us, to taste the fireworks on the air.
Images came, but they did not seem real. I could tell I was not remembering but inventing them.
I tried to see Keith, to remember him ignoring me, but nothing would come. Those memories were lost again to me. Buried, as if for ever, though now at least I know that they exist, that they are in there somewhere, locked away.
My mind turn
I remembered a white dress with frills at the sleeves, frilled socks, black shoes. My hair is still blonde, and I am sitting at a table in front of a cake, with candles. I take a deep breath, lean forward, blow. Smoke rises in the air.
Memories of another party crowded in then. I saw myself at home, looking out of my bedroom window. I am naked, about seventeen. There are trestle tables out in the street, arranged in long rows, loaded with trays of sausage rolls and sandwiches, jugs of orange squash. Union Jacks are everywhere, bunting hangs from every window. Blue. Red. White.
There are children in fancy dress – pirates, wizards, Vikings – and the adults are trying to organize them into teams for an egg-and-spoon race. I can see my mother on the other side of the street fastening a cape around Matthew Soper’s neck and, just below my window, my father sits in a deckchair with a glass of juice.
‘Come back to bed,’ says a voice. I turn round. Dave Soper sits in my single bed, underneath my poster of The Slits. The white sheet is twisted around him, spattered with blood. I had not told him it was my first time.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Get up! You have to get dressed before my parents come back!’
He laughs, though not unkindly. ‘Come on!’
I pull on my jeans. ‘No,’ I say, reaching for a T-shirt. ‘Get up. Please?’
He looks disappointed. I didn’t think this would happen – which doesn’t mean I didn’t want it to – and now I would like to be alone. It is not about him at all.
‘OK,’ he says, standing up. His body looks pale and skinny, his penis almost absurd. I look away as he dresses, out of the window. My world has changed, I think. I have crossed a line, and I cannot go back. ‘Bye, then,’ he says, but I don’t speak. I don’t look back until he has left.
A voice in my ear brought me back to the present. ‘Good. More pictures now, Christine,’ said Dr Paxton. ‘Just look at each one and tell yourself what, or who, it is. OK? Ready?’
I swallowed hard. What would they show me? Who? How bad could it be?
Yes, I thought to myself, and we began.
The first photograph was black and white. A child – a girl, four, five years old – in the arms of a woman. The girl was pointing to something, and they were both laughing, and in the background, slightly out of focus, was a fence with a tiger resting on the other side of it. A mother, I thought to myself. A daughter. At a zoo. And then with a shock of recognition I looked at the child’s face and realized that the little girl was me, the mother my own. Breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t remember ever going to a zoo, yet here we were, here was evidence that we had. Me, I said silently, remembering what I had been told. Mother. I stared at the screen, trying to burn her image into my memory, but the picture faded and was replaced by another, also of my mother, now older, yet not seeming old enough to need the walking stick on which she is leaning. She was smiling but looked exhausted, her eyes sunk deep in her thin face. My mother, I thought again, and other words came, unbidden: in pain. I closed my eyes involuntarily, had to force them open again. I began to grip the bulb in my hand.
The images came quickly then, and I recognized only a few. One was of the friend I had seen in my memory, and with a thrill I recognized her almost straight away. She looked as I had imagined her, dressed in old blue jeans and a T-shirt, smoking, her red hair loose and untidy. Another picture showed her with her hair cut short and dyed black, and a pair of sunglasses pushed high on her head. It was followed by a photograph of my father – the way he looked when I was a little girl, smiling, happy, reading a newspaper in our front room – and then one of me and Ben, standing with another couple I didn’t recognize.
Other photos were of strangers. A black woman in a nurse’s uniform, another woman dressed in a suit, sitting in front of a bookcase, peering over the top of her half-moon glasses with a grave expression. A man with ginger hair and a round face, another with a beard. A child, six or seven, a boy eating an ice cream and then, later, the same boy, sitting at a desk, drawing. A group of people, arranged loosely, looking at the camera. A man, attractive, his hair black and slightly longish, with a pair of dark-rimmed glasses framing narrowed eyes and a scar running down the side of his face. They went on and on, these photographs, and as they did so I looked at them all, and tried to place them, to remember how – or even whether – they were woven into the tapestry of my life. I did as I had been asked. I was good, and yet I felt myself begin to panic. The whirr of the machine seemed to rise in pitch and volume until it became an alarm, a warning, and my stomach clenched. I could not breathe, and I closed my eyes, and the weight of the blanket began to press down on me, heavy as a marble slab, so that it felt like I was drowning.
I squeezed my right hand, but it balled itself into a fist, closing on nothing. Nails bit into flesh; I had dropped the bulb. I called out, a wordless cry.
‘Christine,’ came a voice in my ear. ‘Christine.’
I couldn’t tell who it was, or what they wanted me to do, and I cried out again, and began kicking the blanket off my body.
‘Christine!’
Louder now, and then the siren noise whirred to a halt, a door crashed open, and there were voices in the room, and hands on me, on my arms and legs, and across my chest, and I opened my eyes.
‘It’s OK,’ said Dr Nash in my ear. ‘You’re OK. I’m here.’
Once they’d calmed me down with reassurances that everything was fine – and given me back my handbag, my earrings and my wedding ring – Dr Nash and I went to a coffee bar. It was along the corridor, small, with orange plastic chairs and yellowing Formica-topped tables. Trays of tired pastries and sandwiches sat wilting in the harsh light. I had no money in my purse, but I let Dr Nash buy me a cup of coffee and a piece of carrot cake and then selected a seat by the window while he paid. Outside was sunny, the shadows long in the courtyard of grass. Purple flowers dotted the lawn.
Dr Nash scraped his chair under the table. He seemed much more relaxed, now that the two of us were alone together. ‘There you go,’ he said, setting the tray in front of me. ‘Hope that’s OK.’
I saw that he had selected tea for himself; the bag still floated in the syrupy liquid as he added sugar from the bowl in the centre of the table. I took a sip of my drink, and grimaced. It was bitter, and too hot.
‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, after a moment. At first I thought he was talking about the coffee. ‘I had no idea that you would find it so distressing in there.’
‘It’s claustrophobic,’ I said. ‘And noisy.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I dropped the emergency button.’
He said nothing, but instead stirred his drink. He fished the teabag out and deposited it on the tray. He took a sip.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘Difficult to say. You panicked. It’s not that uncommon. It isn’t comfortable in there, as you said.’
I looked down at my slice of cake. Untouched. Dry. ‘The photographs. Who were they? Where did you get them?’
‘They were a mixture. Some of them I got from your medical files. Ben had donated them, years ago. I asked you to bring a couple from home for the purposes of this exercise – you said they’d been arranged around your mirror. Some I provided – of people you’ve never met. What we call controls. We mixed them all up together. Some of the images were people you knew at a very young age, people you should, or might, remember. Family. Friends from school. The rest were people from the era of your life that you definitely can’t remember. Dr Paxton and I are trying to find out whether there’s a difference in the way you attempt to access memories from these different periods. The strongest reaction was to your husband, of course, but you react
‘Who was the woman with red hair?’ I said.
He smiled. ‘An old friend, perhaps?’
‘Do you know her name?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t. The photos were in your file. They weren’t labelled.’
I nodded. An old friend. I knew that, of course – it was her name I so wanted.
‘You said that I reacted to the pictures, though?’
‘Some of them, yes.’
‘That’s good?’
‘We’ll need to look at the results in more detail before we really know what conclusions we can draw. This work is very new,’ he said. ‘Experimental.’
‘I see.’ I cut off a corner of the carrot cake. It too was bitter, the icing too sweet. We sat in silence for a while. I offered him my cake and he declined, patting his stomach. ‘Have to watch this!’ he said, even though I could see no reason for him to worry, yet. His stomach was mostly flat, though it looked to be the sort that would develop a paunch. For now, though, he was young, and age had hardly touched him.
I thought of my own body. I am not fat, not even overweight, yet still it surprises me. When I sit it takes a different shape from the one I am expecting. My buttocks sag, my thighs rub as I cross them. I lean forward to reach for my mug and my breasts shift in my bra, as if reminding me that they exist. I shower and feel a slight wobbling of the skin under my arms, barely perceptible. There is more of me than I think, I take up more space than I realize. I am not a little girl, compact, my skin tight on my bones, not even a teenager, my body beginning to layer its fat.
I looked at the uneaten cake and wondered what will happen in the future. Perhaps I will continue to expand. I will grow pudgy and then fat, bloating up and up like a party balloon. Or else I will stay the same size as I am now, never getting used to it, instead watching as the lines on my face deepen and the skin on my hands grows as thin as that of an onion and I turn into an old woman, stage by stage, in the bathroom mirror.