by S. J. Watson
The doctor was called Nash. He called me this morning, collected me in his car, drove me to an office. He asked me and I told him that I had never met him before; he smiled – though not unkindly – and opened the lid of the computer that sat on his desk.
He played me a film. A video clip. It was of me and him, sitting in different clothes but the same chairs, in the same office. In the film he handed me a pencil and asked me to draw shapes on a piece of paper, but by looking only in a mirror so that everything appeared backwards. I could see that I found it difficult, but watching it now all I could see was my wrinkled fingers and the glint of the wedding ring on my left hand. When I had finished he seemed pleased. ‘You’re getting faster,’ he said on the video, then added that somewhere, deep, deep down, I must be remembering the effects of my weeks of practice even if I did not remember the practice itself. ‘That means your long-term memory must be working on some level,’ he said. I smiled then, but did not look happy. The film ended.
Dr Nash closed his computer. He said we have been meeting for the last few weeks, that I have a severe impairment of something called my episodic memory. He explained that this means I can’t remember events, or autobiographical details, and told me that this is usually due to some kind of neurological problem. Structural or chemical, he said. Or a hormonal imbalance. It is very rare, and I seem to be affected particularly badly. When I asked him how badly he told me that some days I can’t remember much beyond my early childhood. I thought of this morning, when I had woken with no adult memories at all.
‘Some days?’ I said. He didn’t answer, and his silence told me what he really meant:
Most days.
There are treatments for persistent amnesia, he said – drugs, hypnosis – but most have already been tried. ‘But you’re uniquely placed to help yourself, Christine,’ he said, and, when I asked him why, he told me it was because I am different from most amnesiacs. ‘Your pattern of symptoms does not suggest that your memories are lost for ever,’ he said. ‘You can recall things for hours. Right up until you go to sleep. You can even doze and still remember things when you wake up, as long as you haven’t been in a deep sleep. That’s very unusual. Most amnesiacs lose their new memories every few seconds …’
‘And?’ I said.
He slid a brown notebook across the desk towards me. ‘I think it might be worth you documenting your treatment, your feelings, any impressions or memories that come to you. In here.’
I reached forward and took the book from him. Its pages were blank.
So this is my treatment? I thought. Keeping a journal? I want to remember things, not just record them.
He must have sensed my disappointment. ‘I’m also hoping the act of writing your memories might trigger some more,’ he said. ‘The effect might be cumulative.’
I was silent for a moment. What choice did I have, really? Keep a journal or stay as I am, for ever.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ve written my numbers in the front of the book. Ring me if you get confused.’
I took the book from him and said I would. There was a long pause, and he said, ‘We’ve been doing some good work recently around your early childhood. We’ve been looking at pictures. Things like that.’ I said nothing, and he took a photograph out of the file in front of him. ‘Today I’d like you to take a look at this,’ he said. ‘Do you recognize it?’
The photograph was of a house. At first it seemed totally unfamiliar to me, but then I saw the worn step that led to the front door and suddenly knew. It was the house in which I had grown up, the one that, this morning, I had thought I was waking up in. It had looked different, somehow less real, but was unmistakable. I swallowed hard. ‘It’s where I lived as a child,’ I said.
He nodded, and told me that most of my early memories are unaffected. He asked me to describe the inside of the house.
I told him what I remembered: that the front door opened directly into the living room, that there was a small dining room at the back of the house, that visitors were encouraged to use the alley that separated our house from the neighbours’ and go straight into the kitchen at the back.
‘More?’ he said. ‘How about upstairs?’
‘Two bedrooms,’ I said. ‘One at the front, one at the back. The bath and toilet were through the kitchen, at the very back of the house. They’d been in a separate building until it was joined to the rest of the house with two brick walls and a roof of corrugated plastic.’
‘More?’
I didn’t know what he was looking for. ‘I’m not sure …’ I said.
He asked if I remembered any small details.
It came to me then. ‘My mother kept a jar in the pantry with the word Sugar written on it,’ I said. ‘She used to keep money in there. She’d hide it on the top shelf. There were jams up there, too. She made her own. We used to pick the berries from a wood that we drove to. I don’t remember where. The three of us would walk deep into the forest and pick blackberries. Bags and bags. And then my mother would boil them to make jam.’
‘Good,’ he said, nodding. ‘Excellent!’ He was writing in the file in front of him. ‘What about these?’
He showed me a couple more pictures. One of a woman who, after a few moments, I recognized as my mother. One of me. I told him what I could. When I finished he put them away. ‘That’s good. You’ve remembered a lot more of your childhood than usual, I think because of the photographs.’ He paused. ‘Next time I’d like to show you a few more.’
I said yes. I wondered where he had got these photos, how much he knew of my life that I didn’t know myself.
‘Can I keep it?’ I said. ‘That picture of my old home?’
He smiled. ‘Of course!’ He passed it over and I slipped it between the pages of the notebook.
He drove me back. He’d already explained that Ben does not know we are meeting, but now he told me I ought to think carefully about whether I wanted to tell him about the journal I was to keep. ‘You might feel inhibited,’ he said. ‘Reluctant to write about certain things. I think it’s very important that you feel able to write whatever you want. Plus Ben might not be happy to find that you’ve decided to attempt treatment again.’ He paused. ‘You might have to hide it.’
‘But how will I know to write in it?’ I said. He said nothing. An idea came to me. ‘Will you remind me?’
He told me he would. ‘But you’ll have to tell me where you’re going to hide it,’ he said. We were pulling up in front of a house. A moment after he stopped the car I realized it was my own.
‘The wardrobe,’ I said. ‘I’ll put it in the back of the wardrobe.’ I thought back to what I’d seen this morning, as I dressed. ‘There’s a shoebox in there. I’ll put it in that.’
‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘But you’ll have to write in it tonight. Before you go to sleep. Otherwise tomorrow it’ll be just another blank notebook. You won’t know what it is.’
I said I would, that I understood. I got out of the car.
‘Take care, Christine,’ he said.
Now I sit in bed. Waiting for my husband. I look at the photo of the home in which I grew up. It looks so normal, so mundane. And so familiar.
How did I get from there to here? I think. What happened? What is my history?
I hear the clock in the living room chime. Midnight. Ben is coming up the stairs. I will hide this book in the shoebox I have found. I will put it in the wardrobe, right where I have told Dr Nash it will be. Tomorrow, if he rings, I will write more.
Saturday, 10 November
I am writing this at noon. Ben is downstairs, reading. He thinks I am resting but, even though I am tired, I am not. I don’t have time. I have to write this down before I lose it. I have to write my journal.
I look at my watch and note the time. Ben has suggested we go for a walk this afternoon. I have a little over an hour.
This morning I woke not knowing who I am. When my eyes flicke
red open I expected to see the hard edges of a bedside table, a yellow lamp. A boxy wardrobe in the corner of the room and wallpaper with a muted pattern of ferns. I expected to hear my mother downstairs cooking bacon, or my father in the garden, whistling as he trims the hedge. I expected the bed I was in to be single, to contain nothing except me and a stuffed rabbit with one torn ear.
I was wrong. I am in my parents’ room, I thought first, then realized I recognized nothing. The bedroom was completely foreign. I lay back in bed. Something is wrong, I thought. Terribly, terribly wrong.
By the time I went downstairs I had seen the photographs around the mirror, read their labels. I knew I was not a child, not even a teenager, and had worked out that the man I could hear cooking breakfast and whistling along to the radio was not my father or a flatmate or boyfriend, but he was called Ben, and he was my husband.
I hesitated outside the kitchen. I felt scared. I was about to meet him, as if for the first time. What would he be like? Would he look as he did in the pictures? Or were they, too, an inaccurate representation? Would he be older, fatter, balder? How would he sound? How would he move? How well had I married?
A vision came from nowhere. A woman – my mother? – telling me to be careful. Marry in haste …
I pushed the door open. Ben had his back to me, nudging bacon with a spatula as it spat and sizzled in the pan. He had not heard me come in.
‘Ben?’ I said. He turned round quickly.
‘Christine? Are you OK?’
I did not know how to answer, and so I said, ‘Yes. I think so.’
He smiled then, a look of relief, and I did the same. He looked older than in the pictures upstairs – his face carried more lines, his hair was beginning to grey and receding slightly at the temples – but this had the effect of making him more, rather than less, attractive. His jaw had a strength that suited an older man, his eyes shone mischief. I realized he resembled a slightly older version of my father. I could have done worse, I thought. Much worse.
‘You’ve seen the pictures?’ he said. I nodded. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll explain everything. Why don’t you go through and sit down?’ He gestured back towards the hallway. ‘The dining room’s through there. I won’t be a moment. Here, take this.’
He handed me a pepper mill and I went through to the dining room. A few minutes later he followed me with two plates. A pale sliver of bacon swam in grease, an egg and some bread had been fried and sat on the side. As I ate he explained how I survive my life.
Today is Saturday, he said. He works during the week; he is a teacher. He explained about the phone I have in my bag, the board tacked on the wall in the kitchen. He showed me where we keep our emergency fund – two twenty-pound notes, rolled tightly and tucked behind the clock on the mantelpiece – and the scrapbook in which I can glimpse snatches of my life. He told me that, together, we manage. I was not sure I believed him, yet I must.
We finished eating and I helped him tidy away the breakfast things. ‘We should go for a stroll later,’ he said, ‘if you like?’ I said that I would and he looked pleased. ‘I’m just going to read the paper,’ he said. ‘OK?’
I came upstairs. Once I was alone, my head spun, full and empty at the same time. I felt unable to grasp anything. Nothing seemed real. I looked at the house I was in – the one I now knew was my home – with eyes that had never known it before. For a moment I felt like running. I had to calm myself.
I sat on the edge of the bed in which I had slept. I should make it, I thought. Tidy up. Keep myself busy. I picked up the pillow to plump it and as I did something began to buzz.
I wasn’t sure what it was. It was low, insistent. A tune, thin and quiet. My bag was at my feet and when I picked it up I realized the buzz seemed to come from there. I remembered Ben telling me about the phone I have.
When I found it, the phone was lit up. I stared at it for a long moment. Some part of me, buried deep, or somewhere at the very edge of memory, knew exactly what the call was about. I answered it.
‘Hello?’ A man’s voice. ‘Christine? Christine, are you there?’
I told him I was.
‘It’s your doctor. Are you OK? Is Ben around?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s— What’s this about?’
He told me his name and that we have been working together for a few weeks. ‘On your memory,’ he said, and when I didn’t reply he said, ‘I want you to trust me. I want you to look in the wardrobe in your bedroom.’ Another pause, then, before he went on, ‘There’s a shoebox on the floor in there. Have a look inside that. There should be a notebook.’
I glanced at the wardrobe in the corner of the room.
‘How do you know all this?’
‘You told me,’ he said. ‘I saw you yesterday. We decided you should keep a journal. That’s where you told me you’d hide it.’
I don’t believe you, I wanted to say, but it seemed impolite and was not entirely true.
‘Will you look?’ he said. I told him I would, then he added, ‘Do it now. Don’t say anything to Ben. Do it now.’
I did not end the call but went over to the wardrobe. He was right. Inside, on the floor, was a shoebox – a blue box with the word Scholl on the ill-fitting lid – and inside that a book wrapped in tissue.
‘Do you have it?’ said Dr Nash.
I lifted it out and unwrapped it. It was brown leather and looked expensive.
‘Christine?’
‘Yes. I have it.’
‘Good. Have you written in it?’
I opened it to the first page. I saw that I had. My name is Christine Lucas, it began. I am forty-seven. An amnesiac. I felt nervous, excited. It felt like snooping, but on myself.
‘I have,’ I said.
‘Excellent!’ Then he said he would phone me tomorrow and we ended the call.
I didn’t move. There, crouching on the floor by the open wardrobe, the bed still unmade, I began to read.
At first, I felt disappointed. I remembered nothing of what I had written. Not Dr Nash, nor the offices I claim that he took me to, the puzzles I say that we did. Despite having just heard his voice I couldn’t picture him, or myself with him. The book read like fiction. But then, tucked between two pages near the back of the book, I found a photograph. The house in which I had grown up, the one in which I expected to find myself when I woke this morning. It was real, this was my evidence. I had seen Dr Nash and he had given me this picture, this fragment of my past.
I closed my eyes. Yesterday I had described my old home, the sugar jar in the pantry, picking berries in the woods. Were those memories still there? Could I conjure more? I thought of my mother, my father, willing something else to come. Images formed, silently. A dull orange carpet, an olive-green vase. A yellow romper suit with a pink duck sewn on to the breast and press-studs up the middle. A plastic car seat in navy blue and a faded pink potty.
Colours and shapes, but nothing that described a life. Nothing. I want to see my parents, I thought, and it was then, for the first time, I realized that somehow I knew that they are dead.
I sighed and sat on the edge of the unmade bed. A pen was tucked between the pages of the journal and almost without thinking I took it out, intending to write more. I held it, poised over the page, and closed my eyes to concentrate.
It was then that it happened. Whether that realization – that my parents are gone – triggered others, I don’t know, but it felt as if my mind woke up from a long, deep sleep. It came alive. But not gradually; this was a jolt. A spark of electricity. Suddenly I was not sitting in a bedroom with a blank page in front of me but somewhere else. Back in the past – a past I thought I had lost – and I could touch and feel and taste everything. I realized I was remembering.
I saw myself coming home, to the house I grew up in. I am thirteen or fourteen, eager to get on with a story I am writing, but I find a note on the kitchen table. We’ve had to go out, it says. Uncle Ted will pick you up at six. I get a drink and a sandwich and sit down w
ith my notebook. Mrs Royce has said that my stories are strong and moving; she thinks I could turn them into a career. But I can’t think what to write, can’t concentrate. I seethe in silent fury. It is their fault. Where are they? What are they doing? Why aren’t I invited? I screw up the paper and throw it away.
The image vanished, but straight away there was another. Stronger. More real. My father is driving us home. I am sitting in the back of the car, staring at a fixed spot on the windscreen. A dead fly. A piece of grit. I can’t tell. I speak, not sure what I am going to say.
‘When were you going to tell me?’
Nobody answers.
‘Mum?’
‘Christine,’ says my mother. ‘Don’t.’
‘Dad? When were you going to tell me?’ Silence. ‘Will you die?’ I ask, my eyes still focused on the spot on the window. ‘Daddy? Will you die?’
He glances over his shoulder and smiles at me. ‘Of course not, angel. Of course not. Not until I’m an old, old man. With lots and lots of grandchildren!’
I know he’s lying.
‘We’re going to fight this,’ he says. ‘I promise.’
A gasp. I opened my eyes. The vision had ended, was gone. I sat in a bedroom, the bedroom I had woken up in this morning, yet for a moment it looked different. Completely flat. Colourless. Devoid of energy, as if I was looking at a photograph that had faded in the sun. It was as if the vibrancy of the past had leached all the life from the present.
I looked down at the book in my hand. The pen had slipped from my fingers, marking the page with a thin blue line as it slid to the floor. My heart raced in my chest. I had remembered something. Something huge, important. It was not lost. I picked the pen off the floor and started writing this.
I will finish there. When I close my eyes and try to will the image back, I can. Myself. My parents. Driving home. It is still there. Less vivid, as if it has faded with time, but still there. Even so, I am glad I have written it down. I know that eventually it will disappear. At least now it is not completely lost.