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Before I Go to Sleep

A NOVEL

S. J. Watson

Dedication

For my mother, and for Nicholas.

文案：

"As I sleep, my mind will erase everything I did today. I will wake up tomorrow as I did this morning. Thinking I'm still a child. Thinking I have a whole lifetime of choice ahead of me. . . ."

Memories define us.

So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep?

Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love—all forgotten overnight.

And the one person you trust may be telling you only half the story.

Welcome to Christine's life.

Epigraph

I was born tomorrow

today I live

yesterday killed me.

—PARVIZ OWSIA

Part I

Today

Part II - The Journal of Christine Lucas

Friday, November 9

Saturday, November 10

Monday, November 12

Tuesday, November 13

Wednesday, November 14

Thursday, November 15

Friday, November 16

Saturday—2:07 a.m.

Sunday, November 18

Monday, November 19

Tuesday, November 20

Wednesday, November 21

Thursday, November 22

Friday, November 23

Part III

Today

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part I

Today

THE BEDROOM IS strange. Unfamiliar. I don’t know where I am, how I came to be here. I don’t know how I’m going to get home.

I have spent the night here. I was woken by a woman’s voice—at first I thought she was in bed with me, but then realized she was reading the news and I was hearing a radio alarm—and when I opened my eyes found myself here. In this room I do not recognize.

My eyes adjust and I look around in the near-dark. A dressing gown hangs off the back of the closet door—suitable for a woman, but for one much older than I am—and some dark-colored trousers are folded neatly over the back of a chair at the dressing table, but I can make out little else. The alarm clock looks complicated, but I find a button and manage to silence it.

It is then that I hear a juddering intake of breath behind me and realize I am not alone. I turn around. I see an expanse of skin and dark hair, flecked with white. A man. He has his left arm outside the covers and there is a gold band on the third finger of the hand. I suppress a groan. So this one is not only old and gray, I think, but also married. Not only have I screwed a married man, but I have done so in what I am guessing is his home, in the bed he must usually share with his wife. I lie back to gather myself. I ought to be ashamed.

I wonder where the wife is. Do I need to worry about her arriving back at any moment? I imagine her standing at the other side of the room, screaming, calling me a slut. A medusa. A mass of snakes. I wonder how I will defend myself, if she does appear. The guy in the bed does not seem concerned, though. He has turned over and snores on.

I lie as still as possible. Usually I can remember how I get into situations like this, but not today. There must have been a party, or a trip to a bar or a club. I must have been pretty wasted. Wasted enough that I don’t remember anything at all. Wasted enough to have gone home with a man with a wedding ring and hairs on his back.

I fold back the covers as gently as I can and sit on the edge of the bed. First, I need to use the bathroom. I ignore the slippers at my feet—after all, fucking the husband is one thing, but I could never wear another woman’s shoes—and creep barefoot onto the landing. I am aware of my nakedness, fearful of choosing the wrong door, of stumbling in on a lodger, a teenage son. Relieved, I see the bathroom door is ajar and go in, locking it behind me.

I sit, use the toilet, then flush it and turn to wash my hands. I reach for the soap, but something is wrong. At first I can’t work out what it is, but then I see it. The hand gripping the soap does not look like mine. Its skin is wrinkled, the nails are unpolished and bitten to the quick and, like that of the man in the bed I have just left, the third finger wears a plain gold wedding ring.

I stare for a moment, then wriggle my fingers. The fingers of the hand holding the soap move also. I gasp, and the soap thuds into the sink. I look up at the mirror.

The face I see looking back at me is not my own. The hair has no volume and is cut much shorter than I wear it; the skin on the cheeks and under the chin sags; the lips are thin; the mouth turned down. I cry out, a wordless gasp that would turn into a shriek of shock were I to let it, and then notice the eyes. The skin around them is lined, yes, but despite everything else, I can see that they are mine. The person in the mirror is me, but I am twenty years too old. Twenty-five. More.

This isn’t possible. I begin to shake and grip the edge of the sink. Another scream begins to rise in my chest and this one erupts as a strangled gasp. I step back, away from the mirror, and it is then that I see them. Photographs. Taped to the wall, to the mirror itself. Pictures, interspersed with yellow pieces of gummed paper, felt-tipped notes, damp and curling.

I choose one at random. Christine, it says, and an arrow points to a photograph of me—this new me, this old me—in which I am sitting on a bench on the side of a quay, next to a man. The name seems familiar, but only distantly so, as if I am having to make an effort to believe that it is mine. In the photograph we are both smiling at the camera, holding hands. He is handsome, attractive, and when I look closely, I can see that it is the same man I slept with, the one I left in the bed. The word Ben is written beneath it, and next to it, Your husband.

I gasp, and rip it off the wall. No, I think. No! It cannot be . . . I scan the rest of the pictures. They are all of me, and him. In one I am wearing an ugly dress and unwrapping a present, in another both of us wear matching weatherproof jackets and stand in front of a waterfall as a small dog sniffs at our feet. Next to it is a picture of me sitting beside him, sipping a glass of orange juice, wearing the dressing gown I have seen in the bedroom next door.

I step back farther, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house.

. . .

I GO BACK into the bedroom. I still have the picture in my hand—the one of me and the man I had woken up with—and I hold it in front of me.

“What’s going on?” I say. I am screaming; tears run down my face. The man is sitting up in bed, his eyes half-closed. “Who are you?”

“I’m your husband,” he says. His face is sleepy, without a trace of annoyance. He does not look at my naked body. “We’ve been married for years.”

“What do you mean?” I say. I want to run, but there is nowhere to go. “ ‘Married for years’? What do you mean?”

He stands up. “Here,” he says, and passes me the dressing gown, waiting while I put it on. He is wearing pajama trousers that are too big for him, a white T-shirt. He reminds me of my father.

“We got married in 1985,” he says. “Twenty-two years ago. You—”

“What—?” I feel the blood drain from my face, the room begin to spin. A clock ticks somewhere in the house, and it sounds as loud as a hammer. “But—?” He takes a step toward me. “How—?”

“Christine, you’re forty-seven now,” he says. I look at him, this stranger who is smiling at me. I don’t want to believe him, don’t want to even hear what he is saying, but he carries on. “You had an accident,” he says. “A bad accident. You suffered head injuries. You have problems remembering things.”

“What things?” I say, meaning, surely not the last twenty-five years? “What things?”

He steps toward me again, approaching me as if I am a frightened animal. “Everything,” he says. “Sometimes starting from your early twenties. Sometimes even earlier than that.”

My mind spins, whirring with dates and ages. I don’t want to ask, but know that I must. “When . . . when was my accident?”

He looks at me, and his face is a mixture of compassion and fear.

“When you were twenty-nine . . .”

I close my eyes. Even as my mind tries to reject this information, I know, somewhere, that it is true. I hear myself start to cry again, and as I do so this man, this Ben, comes over to where I stand in the doorway. I feel his presence next to me, do not move as he puts his arms around my waist, do not resist as he pulls me into him. He holds me. Together we rock gently, and I realize the motion feels familiar somehow. It makes me feel better.

“I love you, Christine,” he says, and though I know I am supposed to say that I love him too, I don’t. I say nothing. How can I love him? He is a stranger. Nothing makes sense. I want to know so many things. How I got here, how I manage to survive. But I don’t know how to ask.

“I’m scared,” I say.

“I know,” he replies. “I know. But don’t worry, Chris. I’ll look after you. I’ll always look after you. You’ll be fine. Trust me.”

. . .

HE SAYS HE will show me around the house. I feel calmer. I have put on a pair of panties and an old T-shirt that he gave me, then put the robe over my shoulders. We go out onto the landing. “You’ve seen the bathroom,” he says, opening the door next to it. “This is the office.”

There is a glass desk with what I guess must be a computer, though it looks ridiculously small, almost like a toy. Next to it is a filing cabinet in gunmetal gray, above it a wall planner. All is neat, orderly. “I work in there, now and then,” he says, closing the door. We cross the landing and he opens another door. A bed, a dressing table, more closets. It looks almost identical to the room in which I woke. “Sometimes you sleep in here,” he says, “when you feel like it. But usually you don’t like waking up alone. You get panicked when you can’t work out where you are.” I nod. I feel like a prospective tenant being shown around a new flat. A possible housemate. “Let’s go downstairs.”

I follow him down. He shows me a living room—a brown sofa and matching chairs, a flat screen bolted to the wall, which he tells me is a television—and a dining room and kitchen. None of it is familiar. I feel nothing at all, not even when, sitting on a sideboard, I see a framed photograph of the two of us. “There’s a garden out the back,” he says, and I look through the glass door that leads off the kitchen. It is just beginning to get light, the night sky starting to turn an inky blue, and I can make out the silhouette of a large tree, and a shed sitting at the far end of the small garden, but little else. I realize I don’t even know what part of the world we are in.

“Where are we?” I say.

He stands behind me. I can see us both, reflected in the glass. Me. My husband. Middle-aged.

“North London,” he replies. “Crouch End.”

I step back. Panic begins to rise. “Jesus,” I say. “I don’t even know where I bloody live . . .”

He takes my hand. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.” I turn around to face him, to wait for him to tell me how, how I will be fine, but he does not. “Shall I make you your coffee?”

For a moment I resent him, but then say, “Yes. Yes please.” He fills a kettle. “Black, please,” I say. “No sugar.”

“I know,” he says, smiling at me. “Want some toast?”

I say yes. He must know so much about me, yet still this feels like the morning after a one-night stand: breakfast with a stranger in his house, plotting how soon it would be acceptable to make an escape, to go back home.

But that’s the difference. Apparently this is my home.

“I think I need to sit down,” I say. He looks up at me.

“Go and sit yourself down in the living room,” he says. “I’ll bring this in a minute.”

I leave the kitchen.

A few moments later, Ben follows me in. He gives me a book. “This is a scrapbook,” he says. “It might help.” I take it from him. It is bound in plastic that is supposed to look like worn leather but does not, and has a red ribbon tied around it in an untidy bow. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he says, and leaves the room.

I sit on the sofa. The scrapbook weighs heavy in my lap. To look at it feels like snooping. I remind myself that whatever is in there is about me, was given to me by my husband.

I untie the bow and open it at random. A picture of me and Ben, looking much younger.

I slam it closed. I run my hands around the binding, fan the pages. I must have to do this every day.

I cannot imagine it. I am certain there has been a terrible mistake, yet there cannot have been. The evidence is there—in the mirror upstairs, in the creases on the hands that caress the book in front of me. I am not the person I thought I was when I woke this morning.

But who was that? I think. When was I that person, who woke in a stranger’s bed and thought only of escape? I close my eyes. I feel as though I am floating. Untethered. In danger of being lost.

I need to anchor myself. I close my eyes and try to focus on something, anything, solid. I find nothing. So many years of my life, I think. Missing.

This book will tell me who I am, but I don’t want to open it. Not yet. I want to sit here for a while, with the whole past a blank. In limbo, balanced between possibility and fact. I am frightened to discover my past. What I have achieved, and what I have not.

Ben comes back in and sets a tray in front of me. Toast, two cups of coffee, a jug of milk. “You okay?” he says. I nod.

He sits beside me. He has shaved, dressed in trousers and a shirt and tie. He does not look like my father anymore. Now he looks as though he works in a bank, or an office. Not bad, though, I think, then push the thought from my mind.

“Is every day like this?” I say. He puts a piece of toast on a plate, smears butter on it.

“Pretty much,” he says. “You want some?” I shake my head and he takes a bite. “You seem to be able to retain information while you’re awake,” he says. “But then, when you sleep, most of it goes. Is your coffee okay?”

I tell him it’s fine, and he takes the book from my hands. “This is a sort of scrapbook,” he says, opening it. “We had a fire a few years ago so we lost a lot of the old photos and things, but there are still a few bits and pieces in here.” He points to the first page. “This is your degree certificate,” he says. “And here’s a photo of you on your graduation day.” I look at where he points; I am smiling, squinting into the sun, wearing a black gown and a felt hat with a gold tassel. Just behind me stands a man in a suit and tie, his head turned away from the camera.

“That’s you?” I say.

He smiles. “No. I didn’t graduate at the same time as you. I was still studying then. Chemistry.”