第 37 页

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.

I must have blacked out. When I regain consciousness, I am sitting in a chair. I cannot move my hands, the inside of my mouth tastes furry. I open my eyes. The room is dim, lit only by the moonlight streaming in through the open curtains and the reflected yellow streetlights. Mike is sitting opposite me, on the edge of the bed. He is holding something in his hand.

I try to speak, but cannot. I realize something is in my mouth. A sock, perhaps. It has been secured, somehow, tied in place, and my wrists are tied together, and also my ankles.

This is what he wanted all along, I think. Me, silent and unmoving. I struggle, and he notices that I have woken up. He looks up, his face a mask of pain and sadness, and stares at me, right into my eyes. I feel nothing but hate.

“You’re awake.” I wonder if he intends to say anything else, whether he is capable of saying anything else. “This isn’t what I wanted. I thought we would come here and it might help you to remember. Remember how things used to be between us. And then we could talk, and I could explain what happened here, all those years ago. I never meant for it to happen, Chris. I just get so mad, sometimes. I can’t help it. I’m sorry. I never wanted to hurt you, ever. I ruined everything.”

He looks down, into his lap. There is so much more I used to want to know, yet I am exhausted, and it is too late. I feel as though I could close my eyes and will myself into oblivion, erasing everything.

Yet I do not want to sleep tonight. And if I must sleep, then I do not want to wake up tomorrow.

“It was when you told me you were having a baby.” He does not lift his head. Instead, he speaks softly into the folds of his clothes, and I have to strain to hear what he is saying. “I never thought I’d have a child. Never. They all said—” he hesitates, as if changing his mind, deciding that some things are better not shared. “You said it wasn’t mine. But I knew it was. And I couldn’t cope with the thought that you were still going to leave me, going to take my baby away from me, that I might never see him. I couldn’t cope, Chris.”

I still don’t know what he wants from me.

“You think I’m not sorry? For what I did? Every day. I see you so bewildered and lost and unhappy. Sometimes I lie there, in bed. I hear you wake up. And you look at me, and I know you don’t know who I am, and I can feel the disappointment and shame. It comes off you in waves. That hurts. Knowing that you’d never sleep with me now, if you had the choice. And then you get out of bed and go to the bathroom, and I know that in a few minutes you will come back and you’ll be so confused and so unhappy and in so much pain.”

He pauses. “And now I know even that will be over soon. I’ve read your journal. I know your doctor will have worked it out by now. Or he will do soon. Claire, too. I know they’ll come for me.” He looks up. “And they’ll try to take you away from me. But Ben doesn’t want you. I do. I want to look after you. Please, Chris. Please remember how much you loved me. Then you can tell them that you want to be with me.” He points to the last few pages of my journal, scattered on the floor. “You can tell them that you forgive me. For this. And then we can be together.”

I shake my head. I cannot believe he wants me to remember. He wants me to know what he has done.

He smiles. “You know, sometimes I think it might have been kinder if you’d died that night. Kinder for both of us.” He looks out of the window. “I would join you, Chris. If that’s what you wanted.” He looks down again. “It would be easy enough. You could go first. And I promise you I would follow. You do trust me, don’t you?”

He looks at me expectantly. “Would you like that?” he says. “It would be painless.”

I shake my head, try to speak, fail. My eyes are burning, and I can hardly breathe.

“No?” He looks disappointed. “No. I suppose any life is better than none. Very well. You’re probably right.” I begin to cry. He shakes his head. “Chris. This will all be fine. You see? This book is the problem.” He holds up my journal. “We were happy, before you started writing this. Or as happy as we could be, anyway. And that was happy enough, wasn’t it? We should just get rid of this, and then maybe you could tell them you were confused, and we could go back to how it was before. For a little while, at least.”

He stands up and slides the metal bin from beneath the dresser, taking out the empty liner and discarding it. “It’ll be easy, then,” he says. He puts the bin on the floor between his legs. “Easy.” He drops my journal into the bin, and gathers the last few pages that are still littering the floor and adds those. “We have to get rid of it,” he says. “All of it. Once and for all.”

He takes a box of matches out of his pocket, strikes one, and retrieves a single page from the bin.

I look at him in horror. “No!” I try to say, but nothing comes apart from a muffled grunt. He does not look at me as he sets fire to the single page and then drops it into the bin.

“No!” I say again, but this time it is a silent scream in my head. I watch my history begin to burn to ash, my memories reduced to carbon. My journal, the letter from Ben, everything. I am nothing without that journal, I think. Nothing. And he has won.

I do not plan to do what I do next. It is instinctive. I launch my body at the bin. With my hands tied, I cannot break my fall, and I hit it awkwardly, hearing something snap as I twist. Pain shoots from my arm and I think I will faint, but do not. The bin falls over, scattering burning paper across the floor.

Mike cries out—a shriek—and falls to his knees, slapping the ground, trying to put out the flames. I notice a burning shred has come to rest under the bed, unnoticed by Mike. Flames are beginning to lick at the edge of the bedspread, but I can neither reach it nor cry out, and so I simply lie there, watching the bedspread catch fire. It begins to smoke, and I close my eyes. The room will burn, I think, and Mike will burn, and I will burn, and no one will ever really know what happened here, in this room, just like no one will ever really know what happened here all those years ago, and history will turn to ash and be replaced by conjecture.

I cough, a dry, heaving retch, swallowed by the sock balled in my throat. I am beginning to choke. I think of my son. I will never see him, now, though at least I’ll die knowing I had one, and that he is alive and happy. For that I am glad. I think of Ben. The man I married and then forgot. I want to see him. I want to tell him that now, at the end, I can remember him. I can remember meeting him at the rooftop party, and him proposing to me on a hill looking out over a city, and I can remember marrying him in the church in Manchester, having our photographs taken in the rain.

And, yes, I can remember loving him. I know that I do love him, and I always have.

Things go dark. I cannot breathe. I can hear the lap of flames, and feel their heat on my lips and eyes.

There were never going to be any happy endings for me. I know that now. But that is all right.

That is all right.

I am lying down. I have been asleep, but not for long. I can remember who I am, where I have been. I can hear noise, the roar of traffic, a siren that is neither rising nor falling in pitch but remaining constant. Something is over my mouth—I think of a balled sock—yet I find I can breathe. I am too frightened to open my eyes. I do not know what I will see.

But I must. I have no choice but to face whatever my reality has become.

The light is bright. I can see a fluorescent tube on the low ceiling, and two metal bars running parallel to it. The walls are close by on each side, and they are hard, shiny with metal and plastic. I can make out drawers and shelves stocked with bottles and packets, and there are machines, blinking. Everything is moving slightly, vibrating, including, I realize, the bed in which I am lying.

A man’s face appears from somewhere behind me, over my head. He is wearing a green shirt. I do not recognize him.

“She’s awake, everybody,” he says, and then more faces appear. I scan them quickly. Mike is not among them, and I relax, a little.

“Christine,” comes a voice. “Chrissy. It’s me.” It is a woman’s voice, one I recognize. “We’re on our way to the hospital. You’ve broken your collarbone, but you’re going to be all right. Everything’s going to be fine. He’s dead. That man is dead. He can’t hurt you anymore.”

I see the person speaking, then. She is smiling and holding my hand. It’s Claire. The same Claire I saw just the other day, not the young Claire I might expect to see after just waking up, and I notice her earrings are the same pair that she had on the last time I saw her.