“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 parking lot. 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 parking lot, 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 okay?” 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 leaped 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.
Author’s Note
This book was inspired in part by the lives of several amnesiac patients, most notably Henry Gustav Molaison and Clive Wearing, whose story has been told by his wife, Deborah Wearing, in her book Forever Today: A Memoir of Love and Amnesia.
However, events in Before I Go to Sleep are entirely fictitious.
Acknowledgments
Endless gratitude to my wonderful agent, Clare Conville, to Jake Smith-Bosanquet and all at C&W, and to my editors, Claire Wachtel, Selina Walker, Michael Heyward, and Iris Tupholme.
Thanks and love to all my family and friends, for starting me on this journey, for reading early drafts, and for their constant support. Particular thanks to Margaret and Alistair Peacock, Jennifer Hill, Samantha Lear, and Simon Graham, who believed in me before I believed in myself; to Andrew Dell, Anzel Britz, Gillian Ib, and Jamie Gambino, who came later; and to Nicholas Ib, who has been there always. Thanks also to all at GSTT.
Thank you to all at the Faber Academy, and in particular to Patrick Keogh. Finally, this book would not have been written without the input of my gang—Richard Skinner, Amy Cunnah, Damien Gibson, Antonia Hayes, Simon Murphy, and Richard Reeves. Huge gratitude for your friendship and support, and long may the FAGs keep control of their feral narrators.
About the Author
S. J. WATSON lives in London and worked in the National Health Service for a number of years. In 2009 Watson was accepted into the first Faber Academy Writing a Novel course, a rigorous and selective program that covers all aspects of the novel-writing process. Before I Go to Sleep is the result.
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Credits
JACKET DESIGN BY RICHARD LJOENES
FRONT JACKET PHOTOGRAPH © STEPHEN CARROLL / TREVILLION