“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 around, 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. Okay? 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 anymore.”
“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. “Okay?” I can smell sourness on his breath, and another smell, too. I wonder if he’s been drinking. “We’re going to be okay, 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 backward, 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 toward 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 toward the door, but he still holds my ankle. He pulls me toward 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 around 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 around 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 around. He has rocked backward, 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 toward the door.
With a grunt, he launches himself at me. His whole body collides with mine. Together we slam into the dresser, stumble toward 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 toward 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 at 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 toward 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 favorite 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 carries the smack 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 a 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 around, at the same time pushing me backward. 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 pajamas 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 is 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.